I think the longest our power has ever been out is hours, not days. Our last major outage was in May 2019. A tornado came through that hit within about a quarter mile of our house. Half the neighborhood was without power for about 12 hours. (It came back on right about the time I was waking up in the morning, just in time to make a pot of coffee. Perfect timing!)
Sandy, when I was living in Long Island (NY). The power lines there are strung among the trees, when trees fall down the power goes out. I think it was almost a week. I lived at the end of a cul-de-sac with a lot of trees down, and they obviously prioritized based on the number of houses “downstream” from each break. It was October, it wasn’t like the pipes were going to freeze, so it wasn’t such a big thing.
A week for us, after an ice storm in the winter of 2001, I think it was. The fireplace, which runs off propane, saved our bacon that time. We were able to heat stuff up on the gas cooktop.
The worst part is not having water, since we’re on a well.
Hurricane Sandy was it for me as well, and the lack of water made it really intolerable. Our town knew which houses were on wells and delivered water to us for drinking. We don’t have a pool so…the toilet situation was not pleasant. We were out for almost a week.
Now we have a generator. Ready for the next Sandy!
OK, so the couple of years I lived off the grid doesn’t count?
Probably about 10 or 12 hours (years ago and I don’t remember exactly), on the edge of an ice storm that took some places (including portions of some cities) out for a couple of weeks.
Shorter outages are fairly common here; a number of times in a year. Last month we had two in one week, which was unusual; the longer one of those was about 4 hours.
The years off the grid make power outages easier to deal with; both, I think, because I know how to manage, and because the back of my head doesn’t find it shocking* to not have electricity available. And though I don’t have a generator I have alternative methods for water, heat, washing, cooking, and lighting; I’m on a dead end road and if something (such as the middle instead of the edge of such an ice storm) took out the lines on this or the adjacent road while there were power outages all over the place, I’d expect to be one of the very last places back on. It would be a shame to lose what’s in the freezers, but if the outage were in cold weather I wouldn’t, they’re chest freezers in an unheated back hall.
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*not intended when I typed it, but I’m leaving it in there.
22 hours this last July. There was a storm that knocked out power for quite a bit of the city around 7pm then little by little over the next several hours the areas affected map – seen on a smart phone – disappeared except for one tiny area of a dozen households. Went to bed in the dark, got up the next morning and walked over to the next block – where the pole line ran – to see what the hell was going on.
A couple city trucks* and a big contractor truck were there replacing at least two of the pole transformers and it looked restringing wire as well. Power was restored about 5pm. We did not open the refrigerator or freezer at all during the period so all the food survived. The worst part was, being July, the inside temp had risen to 92-degrees by the time power was back on and the heat pump had only managed to drop it to 85 by bedtime. We slept naked on top of the sheets that night.
*We’re in the old part of town so all utilities, electric, gas, water, are municipal. Other areas in town are served by SRP or Southwest Gas.
92 hours in a Nor’easter in 2013. Temps were single digits to low 20s.
We had just moved into our new house and hadn’t realized that the furnace was hardwired and couldn’t be plugged into the generator. Lots of wood burned in the fireplace and two space heaters running off the generator kept us above 50 for 48 hours.
Dropped my wife and young daughter off at a friend’s house for the third night, I tried to keep the house warm that night with the fireplace but shut off the water that night. Cats and I were in a sleeping bag, and I was in my parka and snow pants. It was 38 by morning.
Then went into a hotel that took cats for the fourth. At 4pm or so a neighbor texted that the power was back on. Incredibly graciously the hotel only charged us for one night.
Now that we know a lot more people around here it wouldn’t be as bad. Last year when we lost power for two and a half days and some neighbors for five, some neighbors were camped out in our basement, and it seemed like the whole neighborhood was getting hot meals from day one from the homes that had whole house generators. Most of which were installed immediately after the 2013 outage.
The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, about three days. Not a big deal for me, being in the SCA, I had candles, a really good icebox, etc. I had a buddy who let me in and I bought two big blocks of ice, and the weather was chilly.
I lost some knick-knacks that walked off a shelf, and had 4 paid days off work. Or was it the whole week?
I believe that it was eight days, if I remember right.
Several years ago we had a huge ice storm that took out power lines all over town. I had no electricity, but thanks to a wall-mounted natural gas heater, I could at least keep warm. Utility workers came in from miles away to help out. Power started to come back on in phases throughout the city as they repaired various lines. My neighborhood was one of the last ones fixed. As I recall, the power went out on a Wednesday, and I got mine back on the following Thursday.
On that first Wednesday, when it became obvious that power wasn’t coming back soon, they finally sent us home from work. Work was also closed Thursday and Friday. By Monday, my office had power back, even though my house didn’t, so I did go back to work that next week.
I live in South Africa so I suffer frequent rolling blackouts due to a shortage of generation capacity, but those are pre-scheduled (there’s an app that says when to expect them) and only 2 hours at a time.
The longest unscheduled outage was, I believe, just under 24 hours when a transformer blew up and had to be replaced and they also had to dig up a road to replace buried cables which had been damaged at the same time. But I live in a big city with a decently redundant grid. My parents live in a rural village and they had a 3-day outage when a storm blew over a major transmission line which provided the only supply.
Only about 12 hours for me on that one. I had a coworker who lived in the mountains somewhere north of Bonny Doon and they were out for days, but it happened so often there even without a quake, he and all the neighbors had generators and plenty of fuel. He said on the third day the Red Cross arrived to ‘rescue’ them and were invited by the neighborhood to partake in some grilled meats and chili they were all cooking together. “They seemed a bit miffed,” he commented.
Have you related the story of this on SDMB? If not, it sounds interesting, if you ever care to share.
Same. I was only 9 years old at the time, but it seems like it was somewhere around 2 weeks without power, as based on my fuzzy memory from over 30 years ago. At that age I had mixed feelings about it. On one hand, school was canceled for 2 weeks. But on the other hand, I had to go 2 weeks without TV.
Second place would be the major ice storm that hit Raleigh my senior year of college. I think the power was out in my apartment for nearly a week. The campus at least had power, so I was able to go there and shower at the gym, use the computer lab to check email (no smartphones back then), and such.
9 days during the Inauguration Day storm of 1993.
It was January and cold. Wife and kids went to stay at her mom’s house across town. I stayed because everyone else in our cul-de-sac sac left and the damage across Western Washington was so widespread, I was worried people might start looting.
I rigged up an old car headlight to a deep cycle battery and shined it at the ceiling for task lighting at night. I had a lot of time to think during that time and I vowed to get more self sufficient after it was all over.
We are on city water from our small town and they have a backup generator.
I now have a 5.5K dual fuel generator, wood stove and oil lamps etc. I can take showers and cook in the travel trailer so power outages are not really an issue any more.
I was in the Columbus day storm in 1962 also, but too young to remember any details.
I lived on a sort of commune my last summer of college and for a couple of years afterwards. It died fairly soon of, I would say, a lack of center. We had use of a patch of land up in the hills on a very back road. We started off in tents and a very battered old trailer, and built a house there which, as far as I know, is still standing; it certainly was, with some modifications, at least 30 years later. One of the things I learned is that it’s possible to build a house with a varying group of people none of whom have ever built a house before. (We did have somebody show up for a day or two who had worked building houses; he showed us how to frame the windows. We found out later that he’d shown us the wrong way to frame the windows – the cheap way, not the way that holds up well.)
We looked into getting electricity out there, but we were somewhere around half a mile or a mile from the nearest power lines, and the utility quoted us an estimate so high that we dropped the idea. We had a wood/coal heating stove, and an old wood cookstove, and kerosene lamps, and an outhouse. Dishwashing was three basins and water heated on the stove. We had various improvised shower techniques depending on the weather, and sometimes took baths at friends’ houses or snuck into college shower rooms a half hour’s drive away. A spring about a hundred feet from the house served both as a water supply and as a refrigerator in the summer (we didn’t need a refrigerator in the winter!) This was the 1970’s, and rather short on regulations.
Another of the things I learned was that electricity and indoor plumbing are indeed nice; but not essential. I knew both of those things before in theory, but living without for a couple of years means I know them in practice.
Five days. Early winter ice storm, 2001. Half of our small town (20k) was without power; other half was unaffected. We basically moved in with MIL, and I came home to shower and get ready for work. (We have a natural gas hot-water heater.) Stepping out of a hot shower into a 45 degree house is, uh, interesting. We lost about 200 bucks worth of beef in our freezer, but otherwise suffered no long-term damage.
Three weeks.
A road-work crew severed utilities to an area that cut all power and gas to my block. Then politics got involved, and lawyers, and… well, two weeks in I realized it wasn’t going to get better and looked for a new place to live. Which is how I wound up in my current residence.
No electricity, no light, no heat, no water ('cause the well pump wouldn’t run without electricity). I’m still a little pissed off about the whole mess.
I live rural in an area with lots of forests, old overhead electric lines and serviced by a country electric co-op. It’s a recipe for frequent and sometimes extended power outages. We usually get a couple a year and it’s not uncommon for them to last for more than a couple days.
The one I most remember and was the longest occurred when we first moved here in 2004. We knew the modifications we wanted to make to the home and property to better manage during outages, but we hadn’t been here long enough to accomplish them. That outage was nearly a week long as I recall. Or maybe it just felt that way. We suffered.
Since then, the wood burner’s been upgraded so it is usable (the old one wasn’t) and it comfortably heats the whole house. I always keep at least 2 years’ worth of wood at the ready.
We buried a 250 gallon propane tank so cooking is possible on the oven’s burners as well as outside on the barbecue grill. Hurricane lamps and candles for light.
I’m on a well, so I keep a good quantity of drinking water and a high-quality water filter in case things get really hairy (think big earthquake). I also keep potable water for bathing and washing dishes. The hot tub holds plenty of water for toilet-flushing in shorter outages. There’s plenty of year-round water on the property if my stores run out.
Our worst outages usually occur in winter, so I’m not concerned with food spoilage in the freezers I keep in the workshop. If an extended outage occurs in summer, I have the equipment I need to can up the freezer contents and avoid spoilage. Happily, it’s never come to that.
I always have phone, but I lose internet. That’s the worst. I keep thinking I should put it a generator, but so far I’m too cheap.
Interesting, thanks. I guess trying to recruit young people to live without connectivity today might be more challenging. Although I guess the counterpoint would be that provided kids could use solar to charge their phones, the only constraint would be cell reception.
My house was without power for almost exactly 7 days during the great ice storm of 1998: January 1998 North American ice storm - Wikipedia. The first night without power we huddled. The next day, drove down to my office (which had power) and slept on my couch and an air mattress which we brought. Then we went to a friend’s who still had power to shower. Then our dept. chair called friend’s to say don’t come back; they had lost power. We slept on a mattress on the floor and there was another family of 3 there also. I tried calling my house every day and, on the fourth day, the answering machine picked up so I knew we had power. In the meantime, friend and I had retrieved my car that I had left on campus and we drove to my house to get some fresh clothes and drain all the water. We then drove to one of my colleagues and drained their water and to one of his colleagues and did the same. It was all very convivial. He kept having short interruptions of an hour or two and, once, the water stopped for an hour and a half. That was scary. Fortunately, he had filled a tub with water.
Since this was January, the house cooled to about freezing and we lost no food in the fridge. We took the meat that had been in the freezer but was partly thawed and made a giant stew that we ate off for a week. I forget what we did with things like a couple dozen bagels we had brought back from NY; probably just used them up.